Been seeing this circulate and can confirm what I learned at work on Monday. Hospitals can no longer report to CDC via NHSN -National Healthcare Safety Network. https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1283261781008437248

NHSN is the means for reporting/tracking healthcare-associated infections. It’s used by hospitals, nursing facilities & long term care, dialysis centers etc and captures things like blood safety errors, personnel influenza vaccine status and infection control adherence rates

For COVID-19, modules were developed and used to gauge: patient safety & hospital capacity, healthcare worker safety and healthcare supply as well other measures in long term care.

It became more widely used after the Affordable Care Act, as an initiative to improve patient safety. It is tied to the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare services and federal reimbursements.

Essentially, ACA forced facilities to do better. If those poorly ran hospitals, rehabs and nursing homes were giving out infections, having unnecessary re-admissions or complications, the CMS payments for service would shore up. NHSN is how we track those things.

No reporting = no accountability from facilities or the federal government. 45 admin will undoubtedly act like “no reports = no Covid-19” and use that as justification to resume normal activities, so proceed accordingly.